Wednesday, 23 November 2011

The house...the way WE want

OK, so I hope you all enjoyed the “tour” the other day, and are ready for more today. Lets just jump right in.

So, the first change we’ll highlight, is the Dining Room. Call us crazy, but we decided we didn’t need TWO front doors & entry points – odd I know – but we did need a dining room. And, presto, chango, we have a dining room. We plan on closing off the front door there (and probably replacing the window at the same time), we’re going to rip up the carpet & the tiley things they had in the old entry, to make one, cohesive floor. We also plan on knocking about 1.5ft from the corner of the room to make the opening into the kitchen bigger (and to avoid having to walk all the way around the corner – those extra 5 steps made me too out of breath, so we had to eliminate them). We are also knocking out the closet that was there to add more space in the kitchen. A “breakfast nook” will take the place of the closet & pesky built-in space, the benches for seating will also double as more storage. The kitchen…tada! Doesn’t it just look so much more open and welcoming now? And since neither of us are hobbits, we have the appropriate amount of room to move, and counter height that better suits us. Because the large window that is there is so low, we aren’t able to add anything in front of it, so by putting our new (and significantly larger) fridge in the previously unoccupied space beside the window we can increase the amount of counter space in that corner. The stove will be moved to the other side, flanked by more counter space & a peninsula. By rearranging the kitchen like this we’ve tripled the amount of counter space, and also added significantly more upper cabinets, that in a miraculous twist of fate allow us to fit not only our plates, but so.much.more! For both of us, the biggest upgrade will be adding a dishwasher! Thank you, Baby Jesus! While neither of us overly dislike doing dishes, it is definitely safe to say, that neither of us actually enjoy doing them either haha…we do them about twice a week (if we were being good), but a lot of times they would pile up, until they were out of control, which was/is a huge embarrassment. SOOOOO, we cannot WAIT until we have a swanky dishwasher of our own. While any dishwasher would be an upgrade, we have our eyes on something, a bit…special.

Ok, moving on, because I have a whole bunch of posts in the not so distant future, that are all about the kitchen, so I don’t want to give too much away now. We are going to put up a half wall in the living room to create a designated, separate area for entry. A place to hang coats, and store shoes (since there isn’t anywhere currently to do that.)

Next we have the bedrooms. Before anyone sees “nursery” and runs away with the idea, NO, we do not have anything to announce at this time…and do you honestly think, that I would announce it like this!? We do however plan on having children at some point in time, and this will be the room that the cuties reside in. If you remember the layout from before, the bathroom, was a lot smaller and there was a laundry room. Here’s a side-by-side just in case you forget.

We are going to move the laundry room to the basement to make more room for the bathroom & the guest room. We are also going to get rid of the tiny linen closet to make the Nursery closet bigger. In order to make the bathroom bigger, we have to take out a window. I think my favourite part about looking at the side-by-side is the floors haha. Just look at how much better the “laminate” looks next to the “carpet”…so much better than the sea of blue!

Lets go downstairs now, because that has a lot more changes than the upstairs haha. This is how we think we would like to layout the basement…keep in mind we wouldn’t even touch the basement to start these changes for 5 years, unless of course we win money, or someone would like to impart a large chuck of change upon us. (We really would welcome that at any time) So this area is the one that has the potential to differ the most from these plans we've come up with.

The basement…dun, dun, dun. We have the biggest ideas for this space – mainly because it is a blank slate and we can do whatever we want. Three cheers for being able to do what you want! We decided you’d come down the stairs and be in the family/living room (we wanted a large enough room that we could fit a sectional…one with a lovely chaise lounger type dealeo. Off the new living room we’ll add a fourth bedroom. (There are two windows in that room we'll have to dig out...not sure why no windows showed up on this plan) Through the livingroom you come into the laundry room, as well as where we'll keep the large freezer, and our seasonal stuff that needs to be stored. To the right will be another (albeit small) full bathroom. Then the room where, “all the magic happens” (so says Jason), the Man Cave. I have always wanted to create a “man cave” in my house, and my hubs deserves one for sure! (Especially after he does all the hard work with the kitchen, and the bedrooms, and the windows, and the bathroom, and the everything hehe) He is rather excited to get this done haha. (Especially since I said we could make a secret entrance for him) Off the man cave is a cold cellar, which I told Jason he could use as his beer fridge…because it’s not like I do much “canning” haha. Then finally we come to the utility & storage room. We are also adding storage under the stairs, and there is also a storage shed type thing on the back of the garage.

Last up we have the master suite! The biggest changes up here are in the bathroom.

We are going to use the closet space (and a bit of the room) to bump out the bathroom. We have big plans for this bathroom – a large 2 person shower, double sink, some storage – like I said before, we have a thing for bathrooms. There was a small closet on the other side of the room that we’ll make enlarge, and add some built-ins and more hanging space (for all of Jason’s t-shirts). Even by shrinking the room, we’re still keeping it large enough for that king size bed we will be soon getting.

There you have it folks. The modified “tour” of our new house, it’ll probably be 5-10 years before we have the place looking like we have it here haha. And even then, I’m sure our plans will change. Stay tuned for all of our kitchen remodel play by play - we'll get right into the nitty-gritty as soon as we can!